My experience living abroad (Clarissa Pelloni)

I was 19 when, even tought i was already in a relationship, one of those that fills your heart, makes you feel butterflies in your stomach, one of those that overwhelms you and makes you dream, I met someone who caught my attention.

I don’t know how it is possible, I don’t know what exactly happened, I swear the love I felt and that I still feel is something that i can’t explain. A love of the great ones, of those who can make immense turns but then they always return from where you left them, a love to which you know you belong and you know that it belongs to you.

We have grown together, he has been always present , in the most beautiful and the most worst moments of my life. Chaotic and a bit crazy but also wise and thoughtful, even after years together he always managed to surprise me and he never left me alone.

But one day in February, the universe made me meet his eyes. Those gray eyes kidnapped me. I used to look and loose myself in the blue soul of those who had always been beside me but this time not, for a moment my heart had no one else in it but him. Like the law of physics, opposites attracted (action-reaction).

Serious, straight to the point but also very kind, he overwhelmed my madness, my being always in a hurry, my tendency to neglect myself.

So after a few months I decided to leave my first love and to throw myself into this new experience, in what seemed to be the beginning of something big, something important, something for life.

And so on September 1st, 2018 I decided to leave my first love, Rome and i moved to Ommen, in the Netherlands.

And here I am, after a year telling you what it was, what it is and what I hope will be my life in a country that has now become home. A year ago, for the first time in my life I took a plane alone, two and a half hours of travel, I left Rome crying, with the knowledge that I would be far away, far from what was my reality, my safe place , my friends and my family, with some packets of pasta and my ever-present coffee in my suitcase. It was not easy, I strongly believe that it takes courage to leave everything ,to go to a place you don’t know, where you know you won’t speak your language, there won’t be the people you’re used to, that warmth and that Italian love where you grew up between mom and the Colosseum.

There is an Italian saying which reads: “whoever leaves the old road for the new one knows what he looses but does not know what he finds”.

And I have to admit it: I found myself.

I spent the first two weeks crying, on a mattress that didn’t have my shape, which wasn’t mine. Afraid to be alone, and not being able to communicate and make others understand what kind of person I was. I spent the first few nights in my house, with guys from countries all over Europe, countries of which I didn’t even know existed.

I spent a year in which for the first time in my life I cooked for myself, I washed my clothes, sometimes with the risk of make my loved hoodies of colors and sizes that didn’t belong to me. For the first time in my life I took walks in the forests and instead of complaining about how tired i was, I only enjoy myself and the wonderful nature I found here. I went from a big city like Rome to a small town in the middle of nowhere, three supermarkets, a place to play billiards, and few restaurants, that’s all. it will have been magic, the case or maybe simply the fact that here it is completely different from where I come from and that here you can connect with your soul and the person that you really are, that I would never go away from this place.

It’s unbelievable how, from feelig like a foreigner now for me this is home, this is where I’m building a future and where I want to create my life and have my successes. I feel that in the future this country will give me a lot, that all the kindness, goodness of spirit and beauty that is here will support my growing personally and professionally.

And even if sometimes I will send a kiss in the wind to my first love, it will be the same wind that will make the mills of my new love turn.